5-10-15-20: Damon & Naomi

Former Galaxie 500 members on Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, New Order, more

Photo by Norman von Holtzendorff

Welcome to 5-10-15-20, where we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives.

We recently spoke with former Galaxie 500 rhythm section and indie rock couple Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang (aka Damon & Naomi), 47 and 46, respectively. The duo's latest record, False Beats and True Hearts, is out now on 20/20/20. They offered both separate and shared selections throughout, including this feature's first "Age 0" pick (you'll see why)...

Damon Krukowski: My mother, Nancy Harrow, is a jazz singer. She's actually pregnant with me on the cover photo for her album You Never Know.

Naomi Yang: But they would only show her face because they didn't think it was sexy to have a pregnant jazz singer.

DK: That album might have been recorded at the end of 1962, right around my conception actually, because I was born in September. This is a record that is so deep in my memory, as is all of my mother's music. It's just what I came with. The crazy thing about this record that I've only come to realize in the last few months is that it features the same rhythm section that's on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. It's interesting, because I was never really a Van Morrison fan. But I recently put on Astral Weeks and I was like "Wow, what a great rhythm section. I can't believe this." I looked at the credits, and it's my mom's rhythm section.

My mother has a really funny tape of me saying my name for the first time, because she was rehearsing in the house and taping it. The pianist that she was rehearsing with was Herbie Hancock-- long before he was famous, when he was a straight-ahead jazz pianist working in New York. So she has this tape where I say my name, and then you hear Herbie Hancock say, "He said his name! Say it again! Say it again!"

NY: My parents actually had no jazz in the house-- only classical music. But, by 1969, even if you only liked classical, you had a Beatles record. They had three Beatles records: Meet the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's, and The White Album. I loved The White Album because of the packaging-- the poster and the pictures that were inside-- and I still remember how the really heavy vinyl felt as a kid putting it on the turntable. I remember a very intense schoolyard discussion about whether "Rocky Raccoon" or "Back in the U.S.S.R." was the best song. It got heated.

DK: Who was your favorite Beatle at five, Naomi?

NY: The same one that's always been: George.

DK: What a sophisticated choice.

NY: Do you think?

DK: Oh come on, yeah. A five year old would go for Paul, don't you think?

NY: No, George was the cutest.

Pitchfork: As classical music listeners, were your parents dead set against rock music besides the Beatles?

NY: No. They just weren't that interested in it. But my brother became a classical musician, so when I was listening to punk rock in high school, he was like, "Oh god, why are you listening to that noise?" This was my younger brother.

DK: Didn't you and your brother have a Sonny and Cher act together for a while?

NY: We watched Sonny and Cher on TV, so we decided to have a show of our own. We were modeling it after Sonny and Cher, but somehow I was the singer and he was a dog. [laughs] We'd jump up and down on the bed, and he would jump up and down on all fours. We wrote a song together, and the lyrics were: "If you want to be advanced/ You gotta know how to do the stance/ You gotta know it now/ Or I'll be a cow/ All over the land/ Yeah."

DK: The first record I ever bought for myself was [the 1973 compilation] K-tel Fantastic: 22 Original Hits by 22 Original Artists. I have a vivid memory of going to Woolworth's on 86th St. and 3rd Ave. in New York and buying this in the basement. Of course, I memorized it from start to finish-- Gary Glitter was on it, Barry White, Elton John. It's funny, I think it might have been the beginning and the end of my relationship with Top 40 music. We've never been musicians that really engage with pop. But I loved that comp; I was a perfect consumer of that type of music when I was ten. The Raspberries had a really 60s sound-- very British Invasion-- even though it was 1973. They were from Cleveland, but I always thought they were British. This is good: Their first album is called Raspberries, and the second one's called Fresh.

NY: My fourth grade teacher, who was very socially conscious, had brought the album Moonshot by Buffy Sainte Marie in to class. I was totally enraptured by her unusual voice and the fact that she was Native American. We were studying different races, it was so weird at the time-- my father was from China, it was a big deal. Now it's not so uncommon to have one Asian parent and one non-Asian parent, but at the time it was very unusual.

I went and found this album in the bin myself. Years later, when we were in Galaxie 500, I was at my parents house and I found it again-- we actually covered the title track with Galaxie 500. It's this very melodramatic story: "Up into outer space you go my friend/ We wish you bon voyage/ And when you get there we will welcome you again." Very "we are all part of the universe, but we are all one"-- very hippie.

DK: We started dating at the very end of high school, but we were aware of each other since 14 or 15. Naomi and I moved in together while we were in college, so we've shared one record collection from very early on. But, at 15, our records were already pretty much the same.

NY: I was obsessed with Elvis Costello's Armed Forces.

DK: Didn't you also write Elvis Costello's name all over our school?

NY: This was in my delinquent period, which was pretty mild, but I did write "Elvis is king" on every single desk in the math room. The radio station we were listening to at that point was [New York's] WPLJ. They had this whole campaign where they advertised all the new wave and punk that they were playing in the subways. They were cardboard cards, and I remember that I stole one from the train. It had this picture of Elvis Costello looking in the mirror in his bathroom combing his hair. I found it at my parents' house last year, and I was like, "Now what do I do with this?"

Pitchfork: I have never seen a subway advertisement I've wanted to take.

NY: Those ads are really horrifying. I was also obsessed with the Jam.

DK: I never did that. That was a girl thing.

NY: That was not a girl thing. We had friends that were spending a lot of time downtown hanging out at the punk clubs. This one friend of mine was like, "You are much more mod than punk. You should be listening to the Jam." I was like "Oh, OK." And I went and saw the Jam.

Pitchfork: Was that your first show ever?

NY: My first show was way more embarrassing: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. It's like a nightmare to me now.

DK: Power, Corruption, & Lies was the college record for us. We listened to it endlessly. We went to Harvard, we still live down the street.

NY: That was when college radio was college radio.

DK: Most of our old Joy Division or New Order records are actually Portuguese or Italian pressings, because those were cheaper than the UK pressings. There were no American copies. "Blue Monday" was the single, but I don't think that was the most important song to me. It was "Age of Consent". Bernard Sumner sings very sweetly on that track, it's sort of sincere.

NY: Another hugely important record was The Days of Wine and Roses by the Dream Syndicate. There was a woman bass player on it named Kendra Smith, and I really admired her. So when Damon and [Galaxie 500 frontman] Dean [Wareham] started to form another band and were looking for a bass player, I was like, "I want to try." It was an instrument I'd been listening to very carefully.

DK: Kendra Smith sang one song on the LP, "Too Little Too Late". [On 1989's On Fire], we positioned the song Naomi was going to sing, "Another Day", in the same sequence that Kendra's song appears on The Days of Wine and Roses. It was a secret tribute to her.

DK: Naomi was 25 in 1989, when we were making On Fire. We were listening to the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album-- almost to a crazy extreme.

NY: It was so important [while making On Fire] that I can't even listen to it now.

DK:We would come into rehearsal and have disagreements about various songs-- it turned out we each had a different mix of the record. We didn't know that the album exists in two mixes-- Dean's LP was one, and ours was the other. That's just how closely we were listening to that record.

NY: Listening and asking, "How did they get this sound?" We were listening to records in a very different way than when we were just fans. As musicians, we wanted to inhabit that kind of sound.

DK: We definitely wrote On Fire with that kind of attention-- thinking in layers about what we could go back and add, how would we construct it. Once we had the experience of being in the studio after our first album, listening to these records bit by bit took on a whole other dimension. We didn't bring a lot of skills to the table, but we were really focused on the sound that we could make together. In those years, we were learning from certain iconic albums that we were deconstructing. Big Star's Third was very formative for all of us, too. That's a really fascinating record because of how it was overdubbed. When I first heard it, it sounded like a normal singer-songwriter record, but when you start to listen to it with attention, it's really strangely constructed.

NY: Galaxie 500 broke up in 1991, so there were a couple of rough years. People were saying, "Well, you know, you can keep the name, just get another guitarist and singer and just keep going." To us, that just seemed totally stupid. That's not what that band was. That band was those three people.

We were tired of the music business. We were starting to listen to very different music-- we discovered the Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt and were listening to music with much longer jams. We were trying to figure out, "What do we do next as musicians?"

DK: So it was like, "Rip it up and start over again," and how to do that without sacrificing everything. Robert Wyatt's such a great model for that. We joined these two friends of ours, Wayne Rogers and Kate Village, for a band called Magic Hour. We played long songs-- our live shows were only two half-hour songs per show. It was a whole different vocabulary for bass and drums. At the same time, we continued to write songs together. We had two musical lives going on, the linchpin being Robert Wyatt. His singing records were very much a model for us in our early duo records.

DK: In 1997, we went out on the road with an acoustic guitar and harmonium and we just had to sing-- it was very naked. Then, we started listening to different records.

All that [Magic Hour's] Kate and Wayne listened to in the van was English folk rock. We didn't know this music at all. At that point, we recorded ourselves at home, so our next record was very much under the influence of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley and Fairport Convention.

NY: A lot of that music had been floating around the underground, but it just wasn't punk rock.

DK: Back in our Galaxie 500 days, we hated those records. When we first went to England, a lot of rock critics there asked us about those records because they thought we must be influenced by them.

NY: They were like, "Oh, you must love Tim Buckley." And we were like, "No." All that orchestration. Ugh.

DK: But at age 35, those were the records we were listening to endlessly-- like What We Did on Our Holidays by Fairport Convention. I love that record, everything about it. Sandy Denny's voice.

NY: That was when we started singing ourselves, too. For the first two Damon & Naomi records, we couldn't figure out how we would ever do them live-- we didn't want to be the singers in the front of the stage because it was too nerve-wracking. But we discovered that if you don't go on tour, your records just disappear. So we decided to figure out how we could play live. All of a sudden it was like, "Oh my God, singing is really a very powerful musical tool that we never appreciated before."

Tomokawa Kazuki

DK: We did a lot of traveling and we went to Japan as a duo. I got very enamoured with this Japanese singer-songwriter named Tomokawa Kazuki.

NY: He kind of works himself up into a fit with just an acoustic guitar as he's singing.

DK: He's really challenging in that he's such an impassioned singer, but it's not in the style that you might think of when it comes to a man and an acoustic guitar, because he screams. We had a friend translate a lot of his lyrics, and they're really naughty and crazy. Very dark. We actually ended up then covering a song of his and meeting him in Japan.

NY: He got us so drunk.

DK: He's from the hard drinking, hard living, gambling, romantic poet era. He heard that we were singing a song of his and he bought us a round of drinks. And he drinks whiskey and soda in pint glasses.

DK: I got very into Leonard Cohen, who I'd never really listened to with that much attention before. Partly because he went back on the road and I went to see his show, and him singing as an old man was amazing. So I went back through all these records, and what's been so powerful for me is his lyrics. We spent a lot of time listening to music where the lyrics weren't important to us, and then we moved to a time when we were paying very close attention to lyrics, but they were splintered by very psychedelic things. But this was just someone signing in English very directly. I was newly awakened to the possibilities of just singing very clearly about something emotional.

NY: I thought it was also the idea that he had been writing all these songs when he was in his 40s.

DK: Yeah, someone writing in what I find to be a very emotionally powerful and poetic manner in their middle age. Songs of Love and Hate, such a great record. "Famous Blue Raincoat". He says at the end, "Sincerely, L. Cohen," which just absolutely destroyed me. Something about the directness of that. He signs off in the lyric. It just gives me chills.

NY: It doesn't give me chills. I want my own record for 45. I've been obsessed with this live record by Vinícius de Moraes called With Toquinho & Bethania En La Fusa.

DK:It's a great live album of Vinícius and Maria Bethania, Caetano Veloso's sister. She's a real diva.

NY: She has an incredible voice. Very deep but hugely soulful and also really joyful. The last record that we did, Within These Walls, represented a very dark period in our lives personally. There was a lot of illness in my family and it was a really hard time. When we started working on [False Beats and True Hearts], I really wanted it to be brighter and have more joy in it.

DK: When the test pressing came back for Within These Walls, we listened to it and made ourselves depressed. This time, it was like, "You know, I don't want to make another record that does that to us."

DK: In Leonard Cohen's defense, something I absolutely love about his records is that there's a joyful feeling I get from this engagement that he has. Even though he may be singing very dark lyrics, there's a sense of pleasure carrying you along and maybe out of his depression sometimes.

NY: It's almost the inverse in this Brazilian music that we've been listening to, where you have this incredibly groovy, high-energy rhythm section but there's a darkness to the melodies-- it's not just, "Ah, we're having a party!"